In a blog post we wrote on m-commerce last year, we gave a broad overview of the history, problems and how businesses could prepare themselves for m-commerce. Although this is all still relevant, like everything in tech, m-commerce has already moved on. In fact, the GSMA just launched its Mobile Economy 2013 report at MWC this week and found that whilst the number of mobile connections is set to increase by about 40% in the next 4 years, the number of mobile broadband connections will increase almost four-fold in the same period. We can be sure that the implications of this on m-commerce will be hotly debated at MWC this week.
So what is being debated? While m-commerce shows a lot of promise, there are various obstacles hindering its adoption. Above all, payments technology needs to be accessible from any device, on any network from any location and fit with current shopping behaviour. Solutions such as NFC are a good start, but it has restrictions and people just aren’t used to swiping their phone to pay for goods.
The first problem is mastering an all-inclusive approach – mobile payments shouldn’t be limited to those with a certain type of handset or operating platform. For example, creating vouchers or deals that only work with Apple Passbook limits your business offer to Apple users. Additionally, the customer should also be able to browse and pay for goods wherever they are to support the entire customer journey. Whether they are in-store, walking down the street or on the bus, all need to be accounted for. Right now, there are many competing solutions in the market – an industry standard is required. However, it’s not just a battle between the bigger brands such as Visa, Google and Barclays – any business should realise the potential of this new channel and if they haven’t already, start to think about the best ways to enable it.
The second challenge to overcome is security. Just as physical currency and cards face fraud, m-commerce has its own problems. For mobile commerce to really take off, businesses need to make sure that vulnerabilities in the mobile platform are recognised and addressed to ensure consumers feel safe shopping this way. At the same time consumers need to be better educated on the payment technology available – mobile shopping is still a very small part of e-commerce because it can be perceived as unsafe. This needn’t be the case if they are savvy about how they use it and it is the industry’s role to raise such awareness.
New methods of mobile payment are always going to be launched, as different organisations try to get a slice of the market. For example, it was recently revealed that payments can now be made via Tweets, while Amazon and eBay have offered secure mobile web payments via their mobile sites for some time now. In order for m-commerce to move forward, it’s important to build trust with consumers. Businesses of any size need to provide professional, easy-to-use sites and payment methods that are ubiquitous and can easily be verified as secure, in order to encourage more customers to pay this way.
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